I have occasion to load very large spreadsheets sometimes up to hundreds of megabyes in size. LibreOffice is the only program I have found that will load these gigantic spreadsheets and still let me scroll around gracefully.

I haven't used OpenOffice in a long time but after reading this thread I thought I'd give LibreOffice a quick check out.

I'm normally ok with iWork but I do have some work stuff which is all MS Office and have a lot of data in excel spreadsheets I have to play with some of which I wouldn't have even attempted to try to use with Numbers.

LibreOffice though seems to be working like a charm even with my most complicated excel spreadsheet. _________________Phil

The Filtering in spreadsheets works ok, but editing whilst filtered doesn't work as it does in Excel.

I frequently export data from a program at work as CSV file and import it into Excel. I then use AutoFilters on the spreadsheet which I then use to help me produce my monthly and weekly reports. Some of the exported fields have very long descriptions, so the data becomes unmanageablt on one screen. To solve this in Excel I just filter on these descriptions and then edit the first one to a much shorter code name. I then drag fill to change the rest which matched the filter. I repeat this for all of the long descriptions until I have them all as short abbreviations. I have to do this in several of the columns, I can do this very quickly in Excel to create a more manageable one screen width layout.

I just tried the same in LibreOffice and the drag fill fills every thing including the non matching data in the intermediate cells. I guess I could sort the data first to group all of the descriptions which would then allow me to still use drag fill without worrying about over writing the wrong data. Another work around would be to use Find and Replace but it's not as quick as Filter - Edit - Drag._________________Phil

LibreOffice is going to surpass OpenOffice easily, when Oracle bought out Sun LibreOffice was created as precaustion incase OpenOffice Oracle discontinued it as they did with OpenSolaris. At one point Oracle refused to let anyone work on OpenOffice and LibreOffice at the same time, at that point people involved with LibreOffice left OpenOffice so it now has the dedicated developers and will be more aggressively evolved.

Otherwise, some issues installing it in Fedora 14, but on Mac and PC side-by-side with OpenOffice is is virtually the same with some modifications to better it, I would rate it in the 80's just because it's far behind MS Office in some aspects that are needed in a business world._________________"You must control your future by taking command of your present, and fixing and learning from your past."

LibreOffice is definitely the future of Office Suites. OpenOffice or any price dependent product will have restricted growth. As each new generation of office suites comes into use, the demand is for open office suites. And LibreOffice is positioned rightly to lead that generational growth.
In LibreOffice the thesaurus is simplified with advance features.Import filters that is present in libreoffice is missing in open office.So libre office is good.